I’ve been telling people for years that crypto built something incredibly important.
Not another coin. Not another JPEG. Not another place for people to gamble on dog tokens.
Crypto built the rails for the future financial system.
For years, whenever somebody told me, “Crypto never built anything,” I thought they were completely missing the point.
The technology was building an entirely new way for assets to trade and money to move around the world.
Eventually, I figured, traditional finance and decentralized finance would start blending together until we stopped thinking of them as two separate things.
I was right about that.
Actually, I think I was dead right.
What I was completely wrong about was the timing.
I thought this transition would take years. Maybe decades.
Instead, it feels like every week something happens that makes the old financial system look a little more outdated.
More money is moving onto these new rails. More assets are trading there. And the distinction between what we used to call “crypto” and what we used to call “Wall Street” keeps getting harder to find.
Now the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is holding a roundtable on September 17 about preparing the U.S. stock market for 24-hour trading.
That’s the language they’re using: “Preparations for 24-Hour Trading.”
Not whether we should do it. But, specifically, how we prepare for it.
That’s a very different conversation.
For almost my entire career, the stock market has opened at 9:30 in the morning and closed at 4:00 in the afternoon.
Sure, you can trade before and after those hours, but 9:30 to 4:00 is when the real action happens. The bell rings in the morning, the bell rings in the afternoon, and everybody goes home.
That whole idea is starting to look ancient.
Wall Street Is Catching Up
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq are already working toward much longer trading hours.
The first big step isn’t quite 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s closer to 23 hours a day during the week.
But I think we’re kidding ourselves if we believe that’s where this ends.
The world doesn’t stop producing information because it’s Saturday. Companies don’t stop doing business because it’s 2:00 in the morning in New York.
There are investors awake in Tokyo while I’m sleeping. There are investors in London trading before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.
Yet somehow we’ve continued operating a financial system built around the idea that everybody needs to show up at the same place at the same time.
That made sense when traders literally had to stand on the floor of an exchange and scream at each other.
It makes a lot less sense when the exchange is a computer.
And this is where crypto comes back into the story.
There is a crypto-based trading platform called Hyperliquid that has become one of the best examples of where all this is going.
People think of Hyperliquid as a place to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But you can also trade contracts tied to the same things people trade on Wall Street.
That includes stocks, stock indexes, commodities, and currencies.
The contracts are called perpetual futures, or “perps,” and the concept is much simpler than the name makes it sound.
Imagine you want to trade Nvidia (NVDA) without actually owning Nvidia stock. You can buy a contract designed to follow Nvidia’s price.
Unlike a normal futures contract, this one doesn’t have an expiration date.
And, unlike Nvidia stock on the Nasdaq, the computer doesn’t particularly care that it’s Sunday morning. The market can just keep trading.
That’s already happening.
There are perpetual markets tied to companies like Nvidia, Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Tesla (TSLA), and Amazon (AMZN).
There are contracts tied to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. There are markets tied to gold, oil and other commodities.
We’re even seeing markets tied to private companies.
That’s when you realize how quickly the lines are disappearing.
This isn’t TradFi vs DeFi anymore.
It’s just finance.
And this is exactly what I’ve been talking about all these years.
The traditional financial system doesn’t have to disappear for crypto to win. Wall Street can simply adopt the things crypto built.
That’s what the rails are for.
What Happens When Monday Morning Disappears?
Imagine Nvidia announces something enormous on Saturday night.
Today, the stock market is closed.
You wait until Monday.
But why?
The news already happened. The entire world knows about it. Investors already have opinions about what it means. There are buyers and sellers who would happily trade with each other.
We’re just telling them they can’t because the clock says no.
That becomes harder to justify when another market somewhere else is already trading a contract tied to Nvidia’s price.
This is where things can get weird.
Imagine waking up Monday morning and Nvidia isn’t waiting to react to the weekend’s news. A market tied to Nvidia has already been trading the information for 36 hours.
Price discovery didn’t wait for the Nasdaq to open.
It already happened.
That’s why I think the move toward longer trading hours is inevitable. Wall Street isn’t doing this because it suddenly discovered weekends. It’s responding to a financial world that increasingly doesn’t recognize closing bells.
And ultimately I think we go all the way.
24 hours a day. Seven days a week. 365 days a year.
There are legitimate problems that come with that.
A market at 3:00 on Sunday morning probably won’t have anywhere near the amount of trading happening at 10:00 on Tuesday morning.
When fewer people are trading, prices can jump around more easily. Add leverage and you can get some pretty wild moves.
So I’m not arguing that a market that’s always open is automatically a better market.
I’m arguing that it’s coming. And much faster than I expected.
American investors still generally can’t legally access the offshore perpetual futures markets where many of these products trade today.
That’s an important distinction. But even that wall is beginning to move.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has opened the door to regulated perpetual futures in the U.S., initially with Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, the SEC is preparing the traditional stock market for dramatically longer hours.
Think about those two things happening at the same time.
On one side, the old financial system is learning how to stay open longer. On the other, the new financial system never learned how to close.
They’re heading toward each other. That’s the part I got wrong.
I thought we’d spend the next decade debating whether traditional finance or decentralized finance would win. I thought we’d be talking about two separate financial systems slowly merging together.
Apparently, we’re skipping most of that.
The rails crypto built are getting more liquid. More assets are showing up on them. Traditional exchanges are extending their hours.
Regulators are beginning to accommodate financial products that would have sounded crazy in America a few years ago.
It’s happening right in front of us.
And I don’t think investors should look at this as a story about whether Bitcoin goes up or down tomorrow. This is much bigger than that.
This is market structure changing.
It’s how assets trade. When they trade. Where they trade. And eventually, what we even mean when we say something is a “stock,” a “future” or a “crypto asset.”
For hundreds of years, markets were organized around a place. You physically went to the exchange.
Then markets became organized around a clock. The bell rang at 9:30. The bell rang again at 4:00.
Now we’re moving into the next version.
The market doesn’t need a building anymore.
Pretty soon, it won’t need a clock, either.
I was right about where we were going.
I just can’t believe how quickly we’re getting there.
Stay sharp,
JC Parets, CMT
Founder, TrendLabs